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Living in a tropical area, for the rainy season (now), lose signal briefly for 5 mins or so. Happens 1x a week on average but the rain has to be very heavy. OTA is very important to me as a workaround.

I know Comcast makes a big deal out of this in their ads, but they neglect to say when they go out, its for hours at a time.

I live in Seattle. While we get a lot of rain, it is very seldom heavy thunderstorm type rain. I have only lost signal to rain/storm once that I can remember in over 10 years with DirecTV. I usually have one or two instances each winter with signal loss due to wet snow accumulation on the dish, but I can reach it and brush it off so it isn't an issue.

When I lived in MI and had Dish I would lose it maybe once a month in the summer, never lost it in the winter. I recently moved to SW FL and now lose it a couple times a week during this summer. About half the time I just lose HD and the other lose both HD and SD. The dish has been double checked for alignment.

HD: when it is a good amount of rain falling
SD: When it pours, and even then not a lot. I remember I ordered a fight several years ago on ppv. It poured down rain from start to finish. Never lost signal during the actual event. The pregame show, lost a lot of that. Made me think somehow the signal can adjust to the rain in the area if given enough time. But that sounds even too high tech for now.

A good installer needs to take a few steps more than the minimum to align the dish.The AIM has a guided alignment, followed by a IV test, which is fairly critical for SNR on all the SATs. This is good, but to get the best rainfade resistance, the tech should look at the 99 & 103 SATs to make sure their SNR is the highest it can be.Some don't have meters that can read the 99 & 103, so they do their best [or not], but don't leave the job done as well as it can be, which may end up with more rainfade than there could be.

I found my best 99/103 SNR was within 2 turns of the fine adjusters.

Is this something that I can do without any special signal meters i.e. have one person at the DVR checking signal levels a second person can adjust the dish?

I think my install took longer than my installer anticipated so I think he rushed the aim a bit... I'd had DTV in the past and had minimal outages during storms... it's far worse with this installation.

Is this something that I can do without any special signal meters i.e. have one person at the DVR checking signal levels a second person can adjust the dish?

I think my install took longer than my installer anticipated so I think he rushed the aim a bit... I'd had DTV in the past and had minimal outages during storms... it's far worse with this installation.

Yes.Before I had the use of the meter, I needed to make some changes to my dish as I upgraded from the SWiM LNB to a SWiM-16.I moved a receiver and TV so I could see it from the dish. I set the receiver to show signal levels and the meter display. I adjusted the dish while checking the 99 SAT.

Living in a tropical area, for the rainy season (now), lose signal briefly for 5 mins or so. Happens 1x a week on average but the rain has to be very heavy. OTA is very important to me as a workaround.

I know Comcast makes a big deal out of this in their ads, but they neglect to say when they go out, its for hours at a time.

Oh, darn. I just lost Comcast internet for an hour, and it's restored now. I should have tested to see if their TV signal was out as well. (no box, just the unscrambled channels).

I lose signal, noticeably, once or twice a year. Less than internet going down or slowing to a crawl.

It seems that any time I bring this up with folks I know who have DirecTV, they insist they rarely, if ever, lose their signal due to storms or whatnot. So I'm currently living with my sister in law while we wait to close on our house, and they just got DirecTV 2 weeks ago. There were some fairly big storms last night, and don't ya know it we lost the signal. So, try to be honest, how often does it happen? Also, when you lose signal, I'm assuming you can still watch recorded programming.

One time a year, maybe twice for a few minutes tops. So. Cal has it's advantages.

Let me put it this way, I lose my Time Warner cable broadband service probably 4 to 5 times a year and it has nothing to do with weather.

It seems that any time I bring this up with folks I know who have DirecTV, they insist they rarely, if ever, lose their signal due to storms or whatnot. So I'm currently living with my sister in law while we wait to close on our house, and they just got DirecTV 2 weeks ago. There were some fairly big storms last night, and don't ya know it we lost the signal. So, try to be honest, how often does it happen? Also, when you lose signal, I'm assuming you can still watch recorded programming.

Yep, big nasty storms do knock out the signal for a short period. The same storms also take out power line and cable tv. Their restoral is not as quick as DirecTV.

Maybe 6-7 times a year. Not a big deal. Have ota available for the major networks which can help sometimes plus the dvr. If the power goes off here it's probably time to crawl into the closet and pray.

We've had lots of rain so far this year. Probably 4-5 times since May. But it is almost always a very heavy thunderstorm with lots of lightening. So I'm usually powering down/unplugging my electronics just in case.

I'm in Southwest Louisiana and we get a lot of rain including tropical storms and of course the occasional hurricane... It has to be a heavy downpour and primarily the storm has to be building from the south to go out.. It rained every day last week for a least a couple of hours and no loss of signal that i was aware of. It's rare and usually short.

Back in 2007, Hurricane Ike grazed us from the southwest with mostly rain and Hurricane Gutsav grazed us from the east with mostly wind around 70 mph gusts and we didn't lose power or signal at all.

I really get annoyed by those cable commercials that act like it goes out everytime it rains everywhere.

I'm in Southwest Louisiana and we get a lot of rain including tropical storms and of course the occasional hurricane... It has to be a heavy downpour and primarily the storm has to be building from the south to go out.. It rained every day last week for a least a couple of hours and no loss of signal that i was aware of. It's rare and usually short.

Back in 2007, Hurricane Ike grazed us from the southwest with mostly rain and Hurricane Gutsav grazed us from the east with mostly wind around 70 mph gusts and we didn't lose power or signal at all.

I really get annoyed by those cable commercials that act like it goes out everytime it rains everywhere.

I live in Central Florida halfway between Orlando and Tampa...Winter Haven to be specific.

My dish is well peaked. I will lose signal if there is a heavy storm with tall thunderheaders to the southwest of my location. The duration is usually betwween 2 and5 minutes, sometimes longer. It depends on size and movement of the storm cell.

Oddly enough, I sometimes lose my signal as the storm is moving toward me and lies to the southwest, and then by the time it is actually on top of me my signal has returned because most of the interfering weather is not between the satellites and my dish.

And as others have pointed out, I can be experiencing an outage on HD channels and then tune in an SD signal successfully.

But I would bet that over the course of a year I experience less than 60 minutes total of weather related outage time.

"Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible."--Frank Zappa

I live in Central Florida halfway between Orlando and Tampa...Winter Haven to be specific.

My dish is well peaked. I will lose signal if there is a heavy storm with tall thunderheaders to the southwest of my location. The duration is usually betwween 2 and5 minutes, sometimes longer. It depends on size and movement of the storm cell.

Oddly enough, I sometimes lose my signal as the storm is moving toward me and lies to the southwest, and then by the time it is actually on top of me my signal has returned because most of the interfering weather is not between the satellites and my dish.

And as others have pointed out, I can be experiencing an outage on HD channels and then tune in an SD signal successfully.

But I would bet that over the course of a year I experience less than 60 minutes total of weather related outage time.

Living in the Tampa Bay area of Florida, we get rain pretty much every afternoon. And I generally lose my signal every time that it does rain. Most of the time, it's for a few minutes, but I've also had signal losses that have lasted 30 plus minutes.

I lose signal in summer thunderstorms. That can be twice, or a dozen times depending on the summer. Probably three times this year so far--it takes the yellow/red stuff on the radar, just rain won't do it. It is usually out for 5-20 minutes. I never lost signal during Hurricane Irene last year but it was breaking up by the time it got up here.